Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process that continually evolves and gives businesses the ability to adapt to changes in consumer behavior, industry trends, and technological innovations.
However, as SEO evolves so do the applications of its various techniques. For example, blogs perform better when the keyword density is low. But product guides and other sales-type content might deliver better results when the ratio of keywords to total word count is higher.
Regardless of the application, here are 6 SEO techniques that have remained consistent in producing the desired outcome in a digital marketing strategy.
1. Run a Technical SEO Audit on Your Website
If you’re having guests over, you want to make sure every room in your home is clean and in order. You plan the menu and the entertainment ahead of time. By preparing for your event, you can be assured that your guests will leave your home happy. They’ll be sharing their experience with their other friends.
It’s the same thing with your website. Before you launch your digital marketing strategy, you want to make sure that your website is ready to receive visitors. You want them to have a great experience they can share with their community.
The first step to giving your digital marketing strategy a boost is to run a technical audit on your website. And we can do this for you.
Here’s a shortlist of what our Technical SEO audit covers:
- Website download speed
- Improve website’s level of mobile responsiveness
- Scan for crawl errors
- Fix broken internal and external links
- Removal of duplicate content
- Optimized text and images
That was just a snippet of what we at Mountaintop Web Design can do for you. Once we’ve completed our audit, then we can proceed with implementing the improvements and necessary changes.
By the time your digital marketing campaign hits full stride, your website will be ready to receive guests. We can assure you that they’ll be back and they might bring some friends with them.
2. Produce High-Quality Optimized Content
People search for content every day. Billions of websites try to comply by putting out millions of content on a daily basis. But not all content can be found or have value to the reader.
It’s not enough to produce high-quality content. Likewise, it’s not enough to produce optimized content. You have to do both.
Quality content is content that’s useful to the reader. It must provide the answers he’s looking for and the information must be correct and updated. Furthermore, the content must be presented properly – well organized, easy to read, and without errors in spelling and grammar.
But to be found, it must be optimized with the right keywords and links that can make it searchable to the search engines.
Here are 10 tips on how to make quality content that can be found on the Internet.
- Find out what your audience wants to read about through surveys, social media engagement, and email newsletters.
- Create a list of high-ranking keywords for the subject matter by using online tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ubersuggest.
- Pick out the keywords that you plan to use for your content. The main keyword should appear in the title, the first sentence of the first paragraph, the body, and the conclusion of the article.
- Select 4-5 supporting or secondary keywords. Depending on the total word count, each secondary keyword should be used at least once.
- Use the main keyword for the title tag, meta tag, image tag, and description tag.
- Keep the sentences short – 20 to 25 words per sentence is ideal.
- Keep the paragraphs short – 3-4 sentences per paragraph is ideal. Shorter paragraphs create more white space on the page and make your content easier to read while scrolling.
- Start out with an outline of the topic.
- Be prepared to go through 3-4 drafts of the content before finalizing it.
- Pass your content through quality assurance software such as Copyscape (Uniqueness), Grammarly (Spelling and Grammar), and Readable (readability of your content).
Take note that sometimes software makes mistakes. After going through the software, read your content again to be sure.
Last but not least, write for your audience. Park your ego outside the office door. If you want to impress the reader, help him solve his problem. Don’t confuse him with technical jargon.
3. Stay Active On the Internet
Digital marketing allows you to reach a wider audience through the use of various Internet-based channels such as social media, online search directories, and industry-specific platforms.
With all of these tools at your disposal, it would be a good idea to capitalize on the exposure they can give your business by staying active on the Internet.
- Set up 2 to 3 social media accounts. Choose the platforms that best fit your type of business.
- Post at least 3 times a week per social media channel. The focus should be on the quality of your content.
- Mix up the types of content that you create and post. Blogging is great but add videos, infographics, and curated articles to your content marketing strategy.
- Engage your followers. Respond to comments and messages within 24 hours. Don’t give generic comments. Personalize them per commenter.
- Reach out to other websites in your niche and propose a collaboration. For example, propose guest blogging arrangements. You can also look into the possibility of co-branding by collaborating on special joint promotions.
- Join interest groups on your social media platform and actively engage in the discussions.
- Collaborate with influencers in your industry. People become influencers once their audience hits critical mass.
You can capitalize on the influencer’s number of followers by offering exclusive arrangements or through payment of services.
An influencer might cost you an arm and a leg but the expense will be worth it that you could consider the payout an investment.
4. Deep Link Your Content
Deep linking is an SEO technique where you include links to your website in your content. You could be linking anchor text to other blogs as references, to the services you offer, to a specific product you sell or to any other web page that validates a statement in your content.
By implementing deep linking techniques, the visitor gets to explore your website’s other pages. If your web copy is on point, you’ll be able to create more value for the site visitor.
Deep linking can also benefit low-ranking pages on your website because now, the search engine crawl bots can find them. Thus, if your website has a high bounce rate, deep linking to other web pages might be able to improve this metric.
Usually, websites that have a high bounce rate are those where the home page is the top-performing page. Getting the poor-performing web pages more visible might encourage the site visitors to stay longer and explore your website further.
5. Study Your Competitors’ SEO Strategies
If your social media metrics aren’t up to par with your competitors, don’t give up the fight. Instead, find out what they are doing. What SEO strategies are they using to get more followers to the social media pages and more traffic to their websites?
- If their content is consistently ranking high on the SERP, find out the keywords they’re using. A good online keyword research tool you can use is SEMRush.
All you have to do is to attach the URL of your competitor’s web page and SEMRush will extract all of the keywords embedded in the content.
Sometimes SEMRush will only extract a few keywords. To build a more reliable keyword list, run at least 5 high-ranking URLs through SEMRush.
- Review the types of content that they publish. Identify the content that generates the highest level of engagement.
List down the topics your competitors write about. Study how they craft their content – review the structure of the blogs, the length of the videos, and the images they use for infographics.
- Visit your competitors’ websites and study how they are designed and structured.
Review the home page and pay special attention to the Calls-to-Action (CTA), the presence of videos or a slide feature, and the location of the functional buttons. Measure the download speed of the website.
The objective of “spying” on your competitors is not to 100% copy what they’re doing but to pick out the strategies and techniques that might help your digital marketing campaign achieve its goal.
6. Reuse Old Content
Have you been blogging for at least 3 months? If so, you have a treasure trove of content just waiting to be reused and still generate more traffic to your website.
Things can change within 3 to 6 months. The information that you shared in a blog post not too long ago would not be the same a quarter of a year later.
The cool thing about reusing old blogs is that you don’t have to spend another 3 hours on them. It’s a cost-effective way of creating content. All you have to do is update the information.
- Edit some of the sections of your blog to reflect the current trend and changes in audience demographics.
- Embed your content with the current high-ranking keywords.
- Replace the hyperlinks with new ones that validate the updated information.
- Change the title or simply add “Updated for 202-”.
- Introduce a new lead-in to your social media post.
- Add new images.
Reusing old content isn’t limited to blogs. You can reuse other forms of content such as videos, infographics, product guides, e-books, web copy, and newsletters. Updated content can help drive new visitors to your website.
Conclusion
As you’ve just read, SEO isn’t as complicated as it’s made out to be. However, it takes time to create content, keep track of analytics, and do research. For these reasons, we recommend hiring an SEO professional or a digital marketing agency to develop and implement your SEO strategy.
If you’re interested in boosting your digital marketing strategy, give us a call or drop us an email. We can customize the SEO strategy to suit your digital marketing goals.
And if you enjoyed this article, feel free to share it with people who are thinking of improving their digital marketing campaign.
